Offbeat Eats

During our visit to Fort Lauderdale for the Fraternal Order of Moai FOMCon, we stayed at the Ocean Manor Beach Resort, one of Fort Lauderdale’s older and more venerable beach hotels (Johnny Carson had a penthouse there, and the Rat Pack were regular 60s and 70s visitors). And it has a reasonably good Tiki bar out back with a nice breakfast, but after a few days, we really felt we needed to explore a bit and find some broader breakfast items. Which led us to a smaller café a few blocks away on Ocean Boulevard called Brew It Café.

One of our goals at Offbeat Eats for the last few years has been to try and visit a bunch of those places that we’ve driven by several times and always thought to ourselves, “We should stop there.” Well, we’ve tried to be better about actually stopping at those places. In this case, our drives to the east often take us through the nice old mill town of Franklin, NH. If it’s around lunch or dinner, we’ve already reviewed two great places in Franklin, Broken Spoon and Vulgar Brewing Company, that we really enjoy, but we still hadn’t really done breakfast in Franklin. A recent trip through there at 8am, however, gave me good reason to stop by Wyatt’s Family Restaurant, on the west bank of the Pemigewasset River right before it merges with the Winnipesaukee River to form the Merrimack River.

As I mentioned a few months ago in my review of the Community Supper at the Union Episcopal Church in Claremont, NH, I’ve been trying to make it to more of the various community meals that spring up around the area. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers. Non-profit fundraisers. That sort of thing. And that brings me to an event I had seen advertised a handful of times, a monthly community breakfast run by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Forest Lodge #69 Breakfast. Held the third Sunday of each month from 8:00 to 11:00 am, the breakfast is served buffet-style, with scrambled eggs, eggs and omelettes to order, blueberry and plain pancakes, biscuits and sausage gravy, corned beef hash, homemade brown beans, homefries, bacon, sausage, fresh-carved ham, and various beverages. Oh, and they use real maple syrup.

Like my previous review of Big Apple Diner, driving between Saratoga Springs and New Hampshire four different times in September also had me passing by another entry on my perennial “I should check that place out” list. In this case, it was a place in Hudson Falls on US-4 as you are heading from Fort Ann into Glens Falls/Queensbury, Sally’s Hen House.

I love it when you pass by cozy little cafés and can immediately tell that the place is popular with the locals and has its set of “regulars”. That was the case with a small little cafe located just about two short blocks from my friends’ condo in Saratoga Springs: the Country Corner Café.

Last Spring, as we were doing one of our preparatory trips to Lake George for Ohana, we stopped in for dinner at Common Roots Brewery in South Glen Falls (our review here). At that visit, I had noticed that Common Roots (whose brewery building itself is relatively new) had been on quite the building spree. Across the parking lot from their main brewery, Common Roots also runs their Bierhall & Barrel House Private Event Center, which in the mornings also operates as Common Roots Café for breakfast. The space is quite nice, albeit extremely cavernous when not being used for events. Since I was passing through South Glens Falls in early September on my way to the Adirondacks, I decided it was a great opportunity to stop in for coffee and breakfast.

The last few years, Chef Jeff Porter has been moving around a lot. He was getting good reviews in South Carolina when he moved back to back to his hometown of Newport, NH, and after some time working as a chef at one local golf course, he opened a food truck in Newport. After a pretty good start in the food truck, he moved to brick and mortar, moving his restaurant, Breaking Bread, into another country club, the Newport Country Club (which I’ve never been to, but it’s one of those spots that seems quite itinerant, since it’s been a good half dozen different restaurants in my years living here). Finally, a pair of storefronts on Newport’s Main Street became available next to the police station, and he moved Breaking Bread downtown. On one of our recent trips to an event in Newport, we finally had a chance to stop by and check it out.

As Summer started to turn to Fall, we wanted to make sure we hit a few of the hikes that had remained on our to-do list. We had tried to hike Mt Chocorua last year, but poor weather forced us to turn around most of the way up. This time, the weather was looking a lot more promising, and since we wanted to get an early start, we needed a breakfast spot enroute to the trailhead. We’ve found several nice places over the years in Bristol, but this time we decided we wanted to try a diner, so we headed out to the Bristol Diner, located just south of downtown.

As I mentioned in my recent review of the Strawberry Festival at the Claremont Union Episcopal Church, I’ve been trying to visit more of the various community meals that spring up around the Upper Valley. Harvest suppers, Church dinners, and fundraisers. With that in mind, in late July Carol and I spotted such an opportunity in the local newspaper, the annual Pie Breakfast sponsored by the Wilmot Community Association in Wilmot, NH. Wilmot is one of the smaller towns in the area, located NE of New London, Wilmot is a cruciform-shaped town that was formed from bits of New London, the Kearsarge Gore (a bit of NH land previously unallocated to any town), and Hill, NH. Like a lot of these towns, it actually has multiple “downtown” areas: Wilmot Center and Wilmot Flat. The Wilmot Community Association (the WCA) hosts occasional community building events, and one of their well-respected annual events is their Pie Breakfast.

One of my more established traditions of our annual trip to Lake George is getting up early one morning and hiking from downtown Lake George up to Prospect Mountain via the Prospect Mountain Trail that approximately follows the old incline railway route. After arriving back at the trailhead in late morning, we almost always follow it with another tradition: eating at Lake George’s The Breakfast Spot.